August 22, 2014

Alexander Rossi will not race in Belgium after all.

It looked like it would be the best week end of Alexander Rossi's career, He was going to take the green flag, at Spa of all places, the same place where Michael Schumacher made his debut, the first American to do so in seven seasons... but it's not going to happen.

" Marussia said on Thursday that Chilton, 23, would be replaced for the weekend by reserve driver Alexander Rossi as a result of "contractual issues". The team refused to give details but on Friday morning Marussia said Briton Chilton would be racing in Spa.
Marussia chief executive officer Graeme Lowdon suggested the issue had been related to financial payments. Lowdon said: "I can't go into too much detail on the individual instances but we are running an F1 team here.
"There are a large number of commercial agreements that are involved and sometimes it just happens we reach a stage where for contractual reasons it's not appropriate for a driver to be in the car and we took that action.
"These things happen. It's the drivers' jobs to be flexible. Both Max and Alex are professional drivers who will take this in their stride."

Or maybe Marussia just got a bit of free attention after watching Caterham get in the news with Lotterer taking Kobayashi's team.

Both Marussia and Caterham were about six seconds off the pace after the first practice session